


electromagnetism

by TheRowdyZone



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Extended Metaphors, Getting Together, M/M, Masturbation in Shower, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 05:11:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRowdyZone/pseuds/TheRowdyZone
Summary: Ned thinks too much.





	electromagnetism

**Author's Note:**

> For the last day of Moschicane Week. I began this when Moschicane week was announced, but I admit I wrote the entire second half in a sort of creative fugue after seeing the art for "Road Trip" by @albaaca on tumblr. Thank you for the inspiration!

Ned keeps the windows rolled down.

Near-continuous lightning flashes like a strobe in the clouds that hang over the darkened highway, briefly illuminating their incongruously fluffy edges in stark flickers. It leaves the air tasting of ozone, layered over the usual smell oil and rubber rising off the still-warm pavement. It's still too hot. But keeping the windows up is stifling, air conditioning or no.

The static electricity he swears he can feel in the air leave his skin buzzing.

Boyd is quiet in the passenger seat.

Ned's awareness of him seems amplified by the unfamiliar stretch of road and the oppressive heat of the storm rolling in off the bay.

An exit boasting an appropriately cheap motel comes up, and Ned doesn't merge.

Anyone else might say,  _ Say, Ned, isn't that a motel we could stay at? _ And frankly, Boyd usually would. 

But Boyd just turns to look at him, abandoning the pretense that he isn't paying as much attention to the road as Ned is. Ned does the driving and the talking, but Boyd never tunes it out.

"Might as well take in the sights, enjoy the road while we're here."

_ It's almost one am _ , Boyd's reprimatory eyebrow arch says.

Ahead the road stretches, two lanes, divided by double lines. The lanes seeming to narrow but never managing it as they speed towards the horizon at eighty miles an hour. Unwavering. 

"It's a beautiful night," Ned says, almost defensive. He reaches for the radio to fill the silence and Boyd beats him to it, covering the controls.

"Not in the mood for music, then?" Ned says, smooth and jovial and patently false. 

The air in the car is stifling and buzzed electric, but it would do so if the night were cold and clear. 

Boyd lets his hand drop from the radio just moments after Ned decides not to press the issue.

"I'll take this next exit, shall I? Now, about our next job, I was thinking---" 

There was a sigh, an exhale, a release of breath almost lost in the rush of sticky summer air through the car.

And Ned swerves, "---that it's a problem better solved after a hearty breakfast, with a fresh eye from a good night's sleep."

And he merges into the exit lane smoothly, and holds his tongue by biting his lip.

He can sit in absolute silence in the dark with Boyd for hours, gloved hands folded in laps, with no sound but cars passing and neighbors' footsteps. But that's on the job. That's simple criminal partnership. The myriad possibilities of ways to occupy their time outside of the job weigh heavy as the humidity.

Here, in the heat of the night, words rumble in his head, and questions crackle at his clenched teeth, and all of it threatens to spill over and flood the car with words. Messy ones, not the clever quips and rambling tangents he so excels at. 

Boyd is quiet beside him.

Ned hadn't known much quiet at home. There was always something going on, cousins and aunts and uncles. His father yelling. 

Boyd is sometimes friendly, surprisingly kind, but sometimes he is cold and quiet and so far up in his own head that he allows Ned to fill the silence.

And under the high pressure of the job, they were simply complementary, a well oiled machine.

But here, in this low pressure area, with Boyd so close, a bed away in a shared motel room, the risks nebulous and hard to define?

He bit his lip harder as they pulled into the parking lot of a motel, and tastes copper.

He's wound tighter as Boyd stretches in the passenger seat, dark shirt riding up, baring taut stomach muscles, already pulled tight as it is across his broad chest. Coiled deep in Ned's rib cage - wire around a nail, buzzing with a current - the usual tug of attraction drags his full attention to Boyd. 

He has years of practice stifling it.

Now he's pretty sure he made a mistake. The simple white-hot copper of desire has spiraled, twisted, wrapped itself around the iron core of his self restraint so tightly, and now with a simple spark he has an electromagnet in his chest dragging him ever closer to Boyd. 

Now waiting for the clerk to bring them a key, standing their calculated three feet apart, is killing him. He has no radio to turn up or windows to roll down. No rubber tires. No insulation. No words. No stalling.

Ned makes the mistake of fidgeting with tail end of his scarf, and suddenly Boyd is looking at him. He smiles. "Just someone passing over my grave."

Boyd's expression went dry. "Full of shit," he mutters. 

"Nothing to worry about, old friend," says Ned.

His eyebrows rise, but the dead-eyed clerk returns and hands them their key, and Ned makes a wide, sweeping gesture. "After you," he says.

Boyd rolls his eyes, but leads the way back out into the heat to find their room. 

Their room.

It's killing him, is the thing. There's something so strangely intimate about hearing Boyd's breathing even out, knowing he was a few short feet away. Something so unavoidably domestic about watching his nightly routine up close, him barefoot in a t shirt and flannel sleep pants, his weapons hidden around the room, his toothbrush by the sink next to Ned's, his soap in the shower. Ned is losing his mind. It's cumulative, but also sudden, and it's been brewing for the last few days, building to this tension that buzzes in the air between them.

He forces a sigh of relief when the door closed behind them, stretching. "We're lucky to have such good sleeping weather," he says. The wind picks up outside.

"Uh-huh," says Boyd, not buying into small talk. 

Ned can't blame him. He's as taut as a tripwire. "A gentleman would allow me the courtesy of pretense," Ned says, and sits down on his bed, always the one further from the window, to take off his shoes. 

Boyd snorts. "You might claim to be a gentleman, Ned, but I don't hold any illusions," he says, as he peels off his shirt. 

Ned's fingers slip on the laces. He focuses on getting his shoes off and tries to remember all of the truly excellent reasons for his restraint.

Their partnership. Boyd's temper. His cowardice.

He gives Boyd first shower, and gets an odd look for his trouble. 

The problem is this. Three nights ago, on a random morning, Ned woke up to the familiar sight of his partner's still-sleeping face. But the early light of dawn streaming through the gap in the curtains caught on Boyd's face, warm and golden, and his hand curled lightly on the pillow where it laid next to head. And the quiet undercurrent of attraction became something else. 

Neon burning in his chest. 

It took it from kind of nice, to have nice eye candy as well as good company and reliable backup, to absolute hell to notice how they move around each other in orbit.

It's also made jerking off to thoughts of Boyd a lot more complicated. Once it had been casual - he spends most days in the constant company of an attractive man, after all. It was natural for him to think about Boyd fucking him. But now he can't stop thinking about it, and worse, can't stop thinking about what if they actually fucked. 

"Ned," Boyd says. "Shower's yours." 

He startles, practically slinks into the bathroom, barricades himself quickly behind the flimsy door. The water heater must be decent, or just unburdened since they're practically the only ones here, because it's impossibly more humid in this steam-filled bathroom than outside. 

Ned showers quickly, but stands under the spray, slipping a hand between his legs as he tries and fails to think of anything but the man just beyond the cramped bathroom, casting that damnable magnetic field. He has practice biting back Boyd's name and pulling the fractured pieces of the mask of indifference to his partner back into place after. 

He cuts the water off but doesn’t move, breathing and legs still heavy, leaning against the shower wall and watching water droplets there shake as they resist gravity. 

There's two at the same rough height that slip down, one faster than the other as it picks up other droplets, leaving parallel trails, and as he stares blankly, another falling droplet pushes the first into the other's path and they converge. 

He realizes he's been standing there too long, and hurries to dry off and dress. But Boyd doesn't question the long pause between the water stopping and Ned reappearing, hair and beard fluffy from being toweled dry. He doesn't even look at Ned sidelong. It feels like a deliberate choice and it sets Ned even more on edge to think that Boyd knows what he was doing and is pretending not to have noticed out of simple courtesy.

If he were inclined to self reflection he'd admit that he can't handle how kind Boyd is to him, sometimes. How Ned seems to be the exception to the rule. How Boyd is always poised for a fight, except he offers Ned his name and a helping hand in that fumigated house, claps Ned on the shoulder and squeezes warmly, steals antibiotics and forces Ned to drink orange juice and chicken broth in the feverish throes of an infection. 

Boyd treats Ned differently than he treats anyone else. More patience, more care, an easier grin, a readier touch. 

If Ned goes down the rabbit hole of considering how and why Boyd treats him as if he were different, special, _ important _ to him, then he will surely go insane. He puts it out of his mind like he does everything else that’s too big.

They go about their nightly rituals, barring the door, brushing their teeth, checking on weapons, turning the TV on low, climbing into separate beds and lying parallel. 

Ned lies awake for hours thinking about the things he said he wasn’t going to think about, like Boyd brushing his hair back out of his face when he was sick, and what might happen if he crosses the mile-wide gulf between their beds. If he closes the circuit.

It makes for a miserable breakfast.

They slide into opposite benches in a booth in a diner. Opposite, and diametrically opposed. North and south of the same magnet.

“You look like shit,” Boyd says. “Want me to drive?”

He does.

Well.

He does, until they’re on the road and he’s too wired to sleep so he’s just watching Boyd at the wheel. They leave the coast, and the clouds, and the claustrophobic stretch of storm-wet highway in the rearview and hurtle inland, towards the desert, the mountains, and clear air.

And Boyd is driving, and Ned has nothing to do but think about him.

He reaches for the radio and Boyd says, “Just talk to me.”

“What would you like me to talk about, friend Boyd?”

“Have you ever been to Nevada before?”

Ned would like to talk about the way Boyd’s accent frames the vowels in the Nevada but instead he starts spinning absolute lies about the Vegas strip and a job in Reno. 

The truth is until three weeks ago he’d never been to the west coast but he’s spent years painting himself as Boyd’s tour guide of America and its many wonders, ferreting out those kernels of the culture which have not been prepackaged and resold for readier consumption.

He doesn’t know shit about the western half of the country, except what can be peddled out to him.

So he lies.

He can tell by the way Boyd is smirking that he knows it’s a lie, but it’s an entertaining lie. These are the important lies: the comforting ones, the entertaining ones, the ones that don’t have to be believed to fill the spaces they need to.

Like keeping his eyes on the road instead of just staring at Boyd. At his hands wrapped around the steering wheel. At the curve of his mouth as he listens to Ned. It’s exactly the kind of wordless lie needed to hold them in equilibrium.

A stopgap measure at best.

They drive a dozen hours without stopping with the ease of practice. Dusk falls and paints the desert in shadows - the air might be clear here, dry, but he still feels trapped. There are mountains in every direction and every single one is knife-sharp, like the teeth of something hungry and devouring.

And the tension is still there, simmering, as the air chills with the dimming of the light.

It’s sudden, when night does fall. It truly falls, without clouds to trap it. The sun hangs low in the mountains behind them and then the sun is swallowed up and they are alone in the dark and the stars burn like the cigarette Boyd asks him to light. 

It’s dangling from his lips. Ned’s knuckles brush his face when he leans over to light it.

“Alright, there, Ned?” Boyd asks, lips curling around the butt of it, amusement curling around the words, when Ned jumps and moves away a little too quick.

“Shocked myself,” Ned lies.

A neon sign looms up, brighter than the moon, proclaiming a motel.

“We should keep driving,” says Ned.

Boyd looks away from the road for just a second. The look is knowing.

“Ned,” he says. “You think too much.”

But he doesn’t slow down for the motel.

“What have you been thinking about so intensely, love?”

“Two magnetic forces of the same charge are incompatible and hold themselves apart, and magnets are made up of two opposite charges on two opposite halves. If you cut a bar magnet in half it can be attracted to the other half but it’s still cutting it in half.”

Boyd hums. “And why are you obsessing over primary school science facts?”

“It started with parallel lines,” Ned says. “How if they ever touch they stop being parallel lines. But they can’t be parallel without the other line. Like the yellow lines here. If they merge into one line they stop meaning the same thing. A single yellow line without the broken line next to it means nothing. A double yellow line keeps the road divided.”

“Ned.”

“The highway is designed for two lanes, always side by side but always traveling in opposite directions, like - like the repulsive force of antiparallel wires.”

Boyd looks at him again. Really looks at him, not just the curious way he does whenever Ned slips up like that. He looks back at the road. Stubs out the cigarette. “Ned,” he says again, and Ned can’t stand how soft his voice is, can’t stand the way the car is slowing down and the pressure in the car is building in the still, cold night.

“Ignore me,” Ned says. “I haven’t been sleeping, I’m practically delirious!”

The car rolls to a stop on the side of the road and the gear shifter clunks as Boyd puts it into park and  _ looks _ at him.

“Talk to me,” says Boyd.

Ned kisses him instead.

It’s the sweet relief of a summer storm breaking overhead and dumping rain, and Boyd pulls him in, his broad chest warm against Ned’s.

He thinks about his cowardice, Boyd's temper, their partnership, and all the excellent lies he’s told himself to try and fill the spaces, insulate himself against the inevitable.

And then Boyd kisses the corner of his jaw and he stops thinking so much.

They leave the windows rolled down.

**Author's Note:**

> @TheRowdyZone
> 
> -Hellbender


End file.
